Stinky Tofu Ruins Everything

The blog enters 2016! I'm excited. Are you excited?

This year is shaping up to be one of the oddest ones yet for me, as my plans are yet unformed. I've had a great time teaching here but I want to move on to new things, so I will be leaving Japan later this year to do other stuff. I won't mention anything specific because everything is still in the works right now, but hopefully it should be good and not terrible.

Anyway: my winter holiday in Taiwan. This was my second attempt to go to Taiwan, and I was finally successful (my first attempt was thwarted by an ill-timed megatyphoon). The weather was balmy, the people were friendly, and I only got food poisoning for half a day. I learned about eight Mandarin phrases and somehow managed to remember and repeat them at the appropriate times. It was great. Some highlights:

• I ate Maltesers, Galaxy and Kinder Buenos for the first time in two years. I found them in the convenience store at the airport arrivals lounge, so right away I knew I was in for a good time. Taiwan has lots of branches of FamilyMart, same as in Japan, but they somehow manage to be better. Good Western chocolate selection and a much better array of microwave meals - lots of things you might actually want to eat, instead of weird pasta splattered with mayo.
  

Sadly, those Buenos left me no room for Modern Toilet ice cream.

• Night markets. This holiday was basically an eating holiday - wander down to a street market, hand over almost no money, eat something amazing. The surprise highlight was deep-fried mushrooms - simply seasoned with grey and red pepper, spicy, filling, delicious. I also got to try muskmelon, and dragonfruit (which tastes different from what I expected - not explicitly tropical, more gently perfumey and....aquatic?). Soup dumplings, tiny bites that burst into an explosion of yummy soup. I had an ice cream in a flowerpot, dusted with tiramisu powder to look like soil. I was also bullied into buying a big bag of nougat, but it was so cheap I didn't mind.
  
  
                                 
  
  
  It wasn't all great - I bought some intriguing stuff which I soon realised was chicken feet. I gave them a try, but they were cold and chewy. Also, one of the most popular night market snacks is something literally called stinky tofu, which is exactly what you imagine it might be. Walking through a market and simply enjoying all the smells could have been great, except you were always wondering when you were going to get the hit of briney, pungent awfulness.
  
  
  
• When you cross the street, the pedestrian light shows a cartoon of a little man walking, and when there are only a few seconds left to cross he suddenly starts running. It's adorable. It's also helpful, as you really don't want to be hit by the millions of scooters everywhere.
  
  
  
•  You can get an hour-long shampoo and head massage for almost no money, which is great when you're all tense from trying to communicate to non-English speakers that you want a shampoo and head massage.
  
  
  
• Seeing in the New Year with the most underwhelming fireworks ever. We were told that fireworks would take place outside a certain mall, and that they were renowned for being spectacular. When we got to the mall we found crowds of people, and joined in the countdown - as much as we could in Chinese - only to find that at the end two piddling flares went off and everyone instantly went home. When we got back to our hostel we found out that they had changed the venue for the fireworks that year. Still, got to walk back through the markets full of tofu.
  
  
  
• Instead of getting a ticket at the subway, you get these cool tokens. Look how cool!
  
  
  

                                           

So that's Taiwan. Let's see what the rest of the year brings us.

On Being Convinced To Join The Army By a Cheerful Tangerine

Japan loves mascots. Mascots for products, mascots for towns, even mascots for emergency procedures (the one for earthquakes is a big mythical catfish). Cute and/or terrifying, mascots are now an essential part of any ad campaign in Japan, and can literally generate billions of yen in new revenue. In November I went to see the Yuru-kyara mascot tournament in Hamamatsu, which is basically a big convention where you get to see all the different mascots wandering around, and vote for your favourite. They even have mascot wrestling (I took videos which unfortunately won't load).

Again, I must stress the 'cute/terrifying' dynamic. Some play it safe with baby birds, pigs, cats and so on. Others take a risk - the nearby suburb of Ama chose a sneering dominatrix who whips people with leeks and screams (no, really). No-one liked that. Not even the people who you suspected might be the type to enjoy it. Another surprise was seeing a big smiley tangerine in a khaki cap, who turned out to be the mascot for the Japanese Self-Defense Force. See, even the military can be cute.

P.S. I got a new laptop. It has a Japanese keyboard, which means sometimes it takes me ages to find quote marks and the @ sign. Still, it works okay.

My laptop broke :(

Bit of a rubbish time, really, what with the most expensive time of year coming up (and because I'm part-time I'm not getting paid at all during the holiday period). I'm trying to get a new one, but find myself stuck in the middle of a few imperfect options - buy a laptop with a Japanese keyboard (workable, but the delete key is so tiny), import a laptop from abroad (posting anything to Japan containing lithium-ion batteries is illegal) or type everything on my phone forever. Being temporarily cut off from the world of tabbed browsing is useful in a way, I suppose, opening my senses to the Earth and enabling me to hear birdsong and rat feet and shit like that. Nonetheless, I want my computer back. Waaahhh.

In good news, I will be going to Taiwan for New Year, which will be my first trip out of Japan (apart from my one visit home in May). In neutral news, I still don't know what I'm doing for Christmas. There might be an attempt at a traditional roast dinner done in my tiny impractical toaster oven. I found Brussels sprouts here for the first time recently, so maybe I'll have some of them, even though I don't really like them. Could set up Netflix and put The Great Escape on loop. Who knows. Merry Christmas.

It's a New Find! - Imaike Cinematheque

I found a new cinema!

Nagoya has a few cinemas that screen films in English, including a few little ones with a tendency to screen interesting smaller films (there are often foreign films in non-English too; unfortunately I can't really go to them since the subtitles would be in Japanese and my reading skills aren't quite that tip-top yet). The Fushimi Million Theater is a favourite - they've a really cool selection of films and hot jasmine tea at the drinks counter. It's also super-easy to reach from my house, and next door there's a really fancy cocktail bar, if you like pretending you're the sort of person who goes to cocktail bars. It's on the second floor; when you leave, the waiter takes you to the lift, says goodbye to you, and then runs down the stairs to say goodbye to you again when you come out.

But until last month I'd never heard of Imaike Cinematheque, even though it was about two minutes' walk away from Saizeriya. (You know how I feel about Saizeriya.) To be fair, it wasn't easy to find - down a murky side-street and up the stairs of a very questionable building. Even though I had it perfectly pinpointed on Google Maps, it took me a while to find it, and when I did it looked like some sort of Acme trap from a cartoon, designed to lure foreigners into nets with the promises of independent films.

Once I was up the stairs, the corridor didn't make me feel any better.

But once I was inside...

Hey, actually all right! Definitely a cinema, albeit one that seems to be run by a man in a room held together by sellotape.

If you're curious, I saw Starred Up, a British prison drama which was very good, and made me feel very smug as I looked around at the eight or nine other customers and thought about what chumps they were for having to read the film. I also got amused at some of the attempts at translating British swearing and prison slang - Japanese doesn't really have 'swearing' in quite the same way as English, so a line like "**** *** you *****ing ***** ********" ends up translated as "sore wa dame yo", which is the kind of thing an incompetent parent might tut at their child to try and get them to stop throwing cereal boxes at supermarket staff. Made me wonder what kind of nuances I miss whenever I watch foreign-language films though.

Nagoya Cinematheque's website is here.

Photo Diary: I Went to A Derelict North Korean School Mate Come Have A Look

Recently I've got very excited about haikyo - abandoned places. Due to factors such as the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble in the 90s, and a declining population in many rural areas, there are lots of abandoned theme parks, hotels, train stations and businesses to be found in Japan. There's lots of interesting stuff to be found if you poke around in these hidden derelict treasurehouses, and you probably won't get crushed to death by unsafe building structures (I hope). I've a few places on my list that I want to nose around in, but last week was my first. Getting there was a little tricky - we had a location on a map but not exact directions, and there was a small element of treasure hunting in working out how exactly to reach our destination - but to be honest this made it all the more fun when we finally made it.

Welcome to Gifu's abandoned Chongryon school for North Koreans!

A brief history lesson (provided by a thoroughly unqualified teacher) may be necessary here. After Korea - previously known as Joseon - split into two independent countries in 1948, the roughly half-a-million ethnic Koreans living in Japan were given the option of registering as citizens of South Korea. Those who didn't became de facto citizens of North Korea, and because Japanese citizenship is not automatically given to Japanese-born children of foreign nationals, there is still a big community of North Korean nationals here today. A pro-North Korean organisation known as Chongryon provides services such as education to the Korean community, and although its influence appears to be dwindling, there are still a few dozen schools in the country providing North Korean-style education in Japan. The one we went to was abandoned in the 80s, but the shell of the building still remains, glowering at Japan from a hilltop.

More Body and Less Person: On Yoro

Handpainted train warnings - a true sign of a good rural station.

Choo-choo. I love tiny train lines in rural Japan, rattling and chucketing through grass fields. I also love Gifu, so what better way to spend a Friday than taking a train through Gifu? This week I got to experience something I'd wanted to see for a while - the Site of Reversible Destiny in the small town of Yoro. Best described as a surrealist park-slash-art-exhibition, the Site of Reversible Destiny promises an Alice in Wonderland-type experience, which toys with your perceptions and aims to leave you disoriented. Did it succeed? We shall see.

We set off from Nagoya station, with the aim of taking the JR line to Ogaki (30 minutes), then changing to the Yoro line, which trundles alongside the Yoro mountain rage through Gifu and down to Mie at a maximum speed of a whopping 40 miles per hour; however we got a little delayed when we decided to stop at Ogaki station for some lunch. I actually used to work in Ogaki, so I felt like I was going to be the big authority on all things Ogaki-related, but when I got there I was shocked to find that everything had changed. There's a Pizza Hut now. Once you leave a place you can never really go back again. (We didn't go to Pizza Hut by the way, we got misokatsu instead. Not because we're all culturally superior and only eat Japanese food, Pizza Hut is just really expensive here.)

Timing ourselves terribly, we got onto the train platform and then had to wait for half an hour for the tiny adorable train to come. It was worth it though. I love trains.

At Yoro station we were greeted by the national animal of Mie which is giant spiders everywhere making webs that are bigger than your house. Staying safely away from all nooks, we strolled down the middle of peaceful roads. Even if we weren't going to a surrealist art park, the trip would have been lovely. These small towns have a lot going for them - calm winding roads, lovely scenery in the distance, and of course the local thing. Every town in Japan has a local thing, if the population is three old men and a dog. In Yoro, it appears the local thing is gourds. I didn't know why, but a quick Google suggests there's a local story about a boy who used a gourd to fetch magical sake from a spring, to comfort his sick father. See, even the uncomfortable familial dynamics of alcoholism is charming in Yoro.

Onto the Site of Reversible Destiny: at the ticket counter we were asked where we were from, and then given quite a nice pair of chopsticks each. I swear to you, the actual phrase used by the smiley woman at the counter was "gaijin present desu". Entering the park we found a series of mind-bending buildings and recreational areas with passages that lead into oddball corners, furniture sticking out of walls and angles designed to play with perceptions. As well as the chopsticks, we got an advisory pamphlet in English, which might actually be one of my favourite pieces of writing I've seen in a while. Though at first it could be mistaken for vague, poorly-translated English, after a few sentences of reading you realise the abstract style is very deliberate and precise, slightly wry in its absurdities, and really quite enjoyable. A few highlights:

"If thrown off balance when entering the house, call out your name or, if you prefer, someone else's."

"Strive to find a marked resemblance between yourself and the house. If by chance you fail to do so, proceed even so as though the house were your identical twin."


"Should an unexpected even occur, freeze in place for as long as you see fit. Then adopt a more suitable (for being more thought out) position for an additional twenty seconds or so."

"Always question where you are in relation to visible and invisible chains of islands known as Japan."

"Move in slow measured steps through the Cleaving Hall and, with each arm at a distinctly different height, hold both arms out in front of you as sleepwalkers purportedly do."

"It may take several days to find everywhere in the house that the dining room is."

"Inside the Geographical Ghost, renege on all geographically related pledges of allegiance."

"Within the Zone of the Clearest Confusion, always try to be more body and less person."


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This park/exhibition (parxibition?) was definitely nothing like anything I'd seen before, and the surroundings were gorgeous too .There were a few people around but the park opened quite a few years ago now and you could tell it wasn't a big attraction any more, if it ever was, and was looking a bit run-down. Mostly this added to its charm, but it did have its downsides - for all the playful geometrics, the biggest surprise I actually got was a dead bat in one of the corridors. I don't think it was meant to be there. I also bumped my head on a tunnel roof twice in five minutes, which was a bit painful.

Still, I had a great day out. I really want to make more use of my time and take more day trips like this, not necessarily to big tourist destinations but to nice everyday places with their own quirks. Hopefully fewer spiders though. And dead bats. And tunnels.

Being Healthy in Japan

Yes, I recognise the irony of doing this post right after my tribute to Saizeriya.

I think people's image of Japanese cuisine is generally very healthy. Little slivers of fish accompanied by a tiny bowl of fluffy white rice and maybe some kind of perfectly placed leaf. That kind of thing. A lot of foreigners here have a hard time convincing their parents that they don't just eat sushi every day. But to be honest, I'm not sure Japanese cuisine is as healthy as its reputation suggests. Some elements are healthy, sure: a lot of seafood, tofu, soybeans, and the portions are generally small (except with ramen for some reason, which generally comes in massive bowls which I literally never finish). However, there's also a lot of convenience food, which a lot of busy workers and students seem to rely on almost entirely: convenience store fried chicken, canned coffee full of sugar, cup noodles, sweet pastries. There are tonnes of small restaurants on every corner that cater cheaply to hordes of tired people. Even in traditional cuisine, there's a fair amount of fried food (Nagoya's specialty is crispy chicken wings), fatty cuts of meat, and sticky glutinous rice. (At this point the entire world screams at me either for suggesting carbs are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of fat, or for suggesting fats are bad and I'm missing out the real culprit of carbs. All of these people yelling I presume have photocopies of their PhDs in nutrition ready to send to me.)

I feel like I meet a lot more people here than back home who simply don't know how to cook. Back home I think cooking is considered an important life skill for every adult, even if many people can only knock up the same few basic recipes. On the other hand, I feel like in Japan lots of people within certain demographics never feel much pressure to learn how to cook and can just rely on families, noodle bars and 7-11 to meet all their nutritional needs. Young people often live with their parents throughout university and beyond, and still have their meals cooked by their mothers. Office workers often have cafeterias and the aforementioned junk-food infrastructure to fall back on, since they don't have much time to cook and many live in small company-provided apartments that may not even have proper kitchens. And men often move from eating their mother's meals to their wife's meals, with any time in between probably not being worth the effort to learn.

For English teachers, too, it can be hard to convince yourself to cook unless you get into good habits. It's easy to get 'skinny-fat' in the eikaiwa lifestyle - not eating until late and living off snacks while working, running around after kids and then slurping up a bowl of ramen with the rest of the miserable worker bees, not gaining weight but not feeling very healthy either. I'm pretty familiar with 'skinny-fat' - the genetic lottery has awarded me a petite frame and I don't gain weight easily, which is easy to confuse with good health until you realise you need a water break and a nap after crambling up a set of stairs. ("Crambling" is a word I invented. I'm going for a portmanteau of scrambling and crumbling.) I'm trying to take better care of my health, Saizeriya aside, as well as trying to consume a lot less meat for various reasons.

But it can be harder in Japan than at home:

•  My working times are awkward, which means I eat dinner late, and I don't have a proper lunchbreak at work where I can get a proper meal out. I really should be better packing lunches for myself rather than allowing myself to get hungry and buying sugary energy bars on my breaks. 
• A lot of ingredients I might buy to cook healthy meals at home (pulses, cheeses, some vegetables) aren't available here, or are only available from expensive import stores which aren't close to my house. A lot of healthy/vegetarian/vegan recipes I see knocking around often rely on fancy stuff that hasn't made it to Japan yet. Quinoa, agave nectar, decaffeinated boobly flour and so on.
• I don't have a proper oven or much cooking equipment/space.
• The meat thing is also hard when you go out, as despite the aforementioned image of peaceful Buddhist simplicity many people get when they picture Japanese cuisine, vegetarianism is still very fringe in Japan and even vegetable-based dishes will generally use meat stock or just go the whole hog (ahem) and stick big chunks of meat in there without telling anyone. I recently saw an online article about eating vegan in Japan, which basically ended up telling people in desperately hopeful terms that you can do it perfectly easily so long as you just stick to eating bits of cabbage leaves and lotus roots that arrive as the side dish to everyone else's meal.

Nonetheless, I'm trying. I've realised the key is good meal planning, so I'm trying to work out my meals every weekend. I might take to doing all my meal prep in advance on one day a week and store lots of pre-prepared meals in Tupperware in the fridge, though I'm a bit worried it'll turn me into one of these wide-eyed nutrition-obsessed ladies in a tank top who eats the same slice of salmon with cucumber every day but always uploads it to Instagram anyway. I'm still basically eating what I want, but I just try to make sure I have things in the house I can actually prepare quickly and eat, or else I tend to get lazy, wait until I'm way too hungry to cook and just get something from Lawson instead. In terms of exercise, I'm enjoying doing pilates at home most days, though the mat I do it on seems to pick up loads of hair and dust which then get all over me, creating a kind of mini-Yeti effect. I'm not sure it's the most intense or effective exercise but I enjoy the way it feels and I already feel like I'm getting a bit more toned and defined.

Hopefully I can update you all on my progress soon! I might even stick up some recipes. And eventually, I'd like to put up a picture of me lifting up a big truck with my muscles. Might have to keep training for a few more weeks though.